phoebe

The Parts

May 16, 2014

Bahiyyih El-Shabbaz Winner, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award  APRIL It’s early April, and my tummy is still a valley. By the summer, it will be a bunny hill. By mid-fall, a mountain. It’s not so...

Forensic Biography and the Art of the Screenwriter

May 16, 2014

Ray Shea paperHere is one thing I do know: I didn’t write down enough of this when it was happening, and now there is nobody I can ask. This is why I am trying to piece together, from the available...

Aspiration

May 16, 2014

Anna B. Sutton The nurse is small, chubby and folded over the desk like laundry folded then forgotten. She’s wearing worn pink scrubs and frameless glasses under a bowl-cut of thinning brown curls....

Oscillation

May 16, 2014

Sayantani Dasgupta Runner-Up, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award  I. When I was nine years old, I read Swiss Family Robinson, and it exploded my imagination. At that time, my family and I lived in a...

A State of Feeling

May 15, 2013

Rachel Luria   Anyone who is to be happy, then, must have excellent friends. —Aristotle “What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and...

The Last Séance

May 15, 2013

Deborah Thompson Winner, Nonfiction Contest   I wrote down memories, detail upon detail, with shamanistic obsessiveness, before they slipped away, before he slipped away. I wasn’t trying to...

Preconceptions, or Frontiers

May 2, 2013

Jacqueline Kolosov   After two years of trying, my husband Tom and I began to seriously consider reproductive technologies to conceive a second child. “Do you think I could love another child...

Sea Change

May 14, 2012

Nonfiction Priscilla Kinter

Soil and leaves filled the empty human spaces, and always the buzzing of insects. Spider silk and dust and feathers and carapaces accumulated to build...

Cornish Pasty

May 14, 2012

Nonfiction Alice Lowe

When Don says, “Wow, she’s good,” I muster up a grudging agreement, but I can taste the bitter wilted greens of envy. I’m already lamenting my lack of...